Zip, the AI platform for enterprise procurement, today announced two major launches: Zip Superagents and Zip MCP. Designed to work alongside the humans who handle procurement today, Superagents are an AI platform that takes on real work – reviewing contracts, unblocking approvals, coding invoices, and researching vendors – with every action audited and governed inside Zip. Zip MCP is a procurement-native implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects Zip’s procurement intelligence directly to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT, enabling employees to work in their preferred AI tools without leaving Zip’s controls behind.
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Introducing Zip Superagents, MCP, and AI Spend Automation
Zip is also launching Zip AI Spend Automation, a new enterprise offering that combines platform access, AI consumption credits, and support from Zip’s own forward-deployed engineers to help the most progressive organizations fully automate their intake-to-pay process. Block and UCI Health are among the first enterprise customers to deploy AI Spend Automation, with UCI Health already reporting $20M in cost avoidance and value recapture from a single project.
The Governance Gap Shadow AI Left Behind
Most companies don’t have the infrastructure to safely run AI on their procurement data yet, but employees aren’t waiting for it. Across the enterprise, employees are uploading spend data into Claude to analyze it, redlining sensitive contracts inside ChatGPT, and generating internal financial analyses in personal Gemini or Copilot accounts. Every time they do, sensitive enterprise data leaves systems where every action is controlled and audited, entering environments with no oversight, no compliance controls, and no record of what was done.
The consequences for getting this wrong aren’t hypothetical. SOX violations carry fines of up to $25 million. Executives can face prison time. Public companies that fail compliance audits can be delisted from the stock exchange. When an auditor asks how a decision was made six months later, no one can produce a record. When an employee leaves the company, sensitive data lives on in their personal AI history.
That’s why the world’s leading AI companies run their procurement on Zip. Procurement is one of the few business functions where decisions carry direct financial, legal, and compliance consequences, and where every approval needs to be auditable months or years later. To date, Zip’s customers have saved more than $10 billion through its AI suite by running AI inside a procurement-native governance layer rather than alongside one. Today’s launch is how Zip closes that gap: by connecting procurement infrastructure directly to the AI assistants employees already use, and by launching Superagents to take on the procurement workflows no system has been able to fully automate until now.
“After working with hundreds of enterprises – including the world’s leading AI companies – we’ve learned that this kind of work is already happening, with or without governance,” said Lu Cheng, Co-Founder and CTO at Zip. “Even the companies building AI themselves want this work governed. They want the audit trail. They want the controls. They want the integrations to their systems of record. And they want to make sure their employees aren’t uploading sensitive financial, contract, and customer data into general-purpose AI. That’s why we built Zip’s orchestration layer the way we did over the past five years, so that AI doesn’t just operate alongside enterprise procurement, but inside it, where every action is governed and auditable.”
Zip Superagents: Governed AI That Takes On the Work
Zip Superagents are AI agents designed to reason, act, and collaborate inside the workflows where procurement actually happens. Unlike general-purpose AI tools or scripted automation, Superagents are embedded within Zip’s orchestration platform, where each customer’s approval policies, supplier data, ERP integrations, contracts, spend history, and stakeholder workflows already live.
That context is what allows Superagents to do more than generate recommendations. They can determine the right next step, take action across systems, coordinate with employees and stakeholders, and escalate for human review when needed. Every action is governed by the same roles, permissions, and controls that apply to employees, with granular action settings, audit trails, and deterministic logic for high-impact steps like system updates and approvals.
At launch, Zip is introducing five Superagents built around the highest-friction areas of procurement:
- Procurement Superagent: Unblocks stalled requests, manages tail-spend negotiation, and handles repetitive follow-up within procurement’s approved policies and approval controls.
- Contract Superagent: Reviews and redlines contracts against company-approved playbooks, flags deviations from standard terms, and routes high-risk issues to legal stakeholders.
- AP Superagent: Sorts, codes, matches, and routes invoices using existing approval rules, supplier records, and ERP data to reduce manual AP work while maintaining accurate payment controls.
- Config Superagent: Identifies workflow bottlenecks and drafts configuration improvements for admin review – letting teams continuously optimize processes without uncontrolled changes to critical workflows.
- Intake Superagent: Guides employees through compliant request creation, routing purchases to the right buying channel, extracting quote details, nudging toward preferred suppliers, and prefilling required fields based on policy and supplier context.
“At Block, we’ve made a fundamental bet on AI,” noted Mithun Sharma, Chief Procurement Officer at Block. “Every team has a mandate to automate, and procurement is no different. This is one of the many reasons we have partnered with Zip. We get the procurement platform our team runs on, fully governed AI agents automating the work, and forward-deployed engineers who specialize in procurement AI and build alongside us.”
Zip MCP: Procurement Governance, Wherever Employees Work
Ungoverned AI doesn’t only happen in shadow tools, it also happens when employees do procurement work inside AI assistants that have no connection to enterprise controls. Zip MCP closes that gap.
Zip’s vendor-hosted MCP connects Zip’s AI procurement platform directly to any MCP-compatible AI assistant. An employee researching vendors in Claude can have Zip proactively surface a request submission directly from that conversation, creating earlier visibility for procurement teams without any context switching. Power users can pull aggregated reporting across suppliers, requests, invoices, and payments from within a single AI conversation. Every action respects user permissions through OAuth, runs inside Zip’s compliance controls, and generates a complete audit trail.
Zip MCP is model-agnostic, ensuring procurement governance travels with the work regardless of which AI tool an employee prefers. This is the first time MCP has been implemented natively for enterprise procurement.
Zip AI Spend Automation: How Enterprises Get There
Superagents are powerful out of the box. But enterprise procurement is not one-size-fits-all. Every organization has unique approval hierarchies, compliance requirements, vendor policies, and edge cases. Zip AI Spend Automation is how the largest enterprises fully deploy governed AI agents for their specific workflows.
AI Spend Automation pairs platform access and AI consumption credits with Zip’s team of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), who build and deploy custom agents directly inside customer environments:
- Zip agent builder platform: Access to all Superagent use cases, skills, and tools
- Custom development: Ongoing support from forward-deployed engineers for agent configuration and optimization
- Advanced AI governance: Access to additional control and auditability capabilities purpose-built for enterprise needs
- Consumption credits: Bundled AI credits to supercharge AI usage
“Healthcare operates on a different set of stakes, where delayed decisions and fragmented processes create real consequences for patient care, organizational agility, and financial stewardship,” said Susanna Rustad, Chief Procurement and Supply Chain Officer at UCI Health. “What stood out to us about Zip’s AI Spend Automation was its ability to bring greater visibility, alignment, and discipline to complex enterprise decisions. In one major IT infrastructure initiative, it contributed to more than $20 million in cost avoidance and value recapture.”
Availability
Zip MCP and Zip Superagents are available in beta today, included with all core Zip products, and will be generally available this summer. Zip AI Spend Automation is available now for enterprise customers.
To learn more, visit zip.com.
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